Perceived training needs for effective virtual teams: an exploratory study

In the last decades, virtual teams have been increasingly adopted within organizations. Academic literature has studied this trend especially fo-cusing on factors affecting virtual team’s effectiveness as well as opportunities and disadvantages related to their usage. Nevertheless, there is a need to explore more in depth the kind of initiatives that the HR Department has to promote for sustain effective virtual teams particularly in terms of training and development actions. The research questions addressed in this research in progress paper are: What are the training needs perceived by virtual teams’ members in the early stage of their adoption? What are the perceived benefits and challenges related to the early stage of virtual collaboration? We conducted an exploratory study in order to promote a first understanding of factors likely to affect virtual team’s effectiveness with special focus on training needs in the early stages of virtual team membership. Our methodology consisted of a qualitative approach by in-terviewing five virtual team members of Nielsen TAM Italy. In this paper the results of this qualitative study are presented. The goal of this exploratory phase is to restitute a large part of the complexity which accompanies the creation of conditions for effective virtual teams and to identify the most critical issues to be taken into account for the further research steps.